The Sonoran Desert is a magical place full of beauty and wonder. With an increase each year in the number of new families calling Arizona their home, so also comes an increase in pre-conceived notions of the dangers of the Sonoran Desert. Dangers such as plants, animals, and weather conditions can cause fears in families. Though these fears are valid, understanding different ways to stay safe and engage with nature in the Sonoran Desert is critical to building future generations of adults that value the natural world. Current literature does not address the Sonoran Desert and Arizona as a space to engage in nature play. The current action research study builds on the literature to offer new perspectives on nature play in the Sonoran Desert. A mixed-methods approach was used to assess caregivers' perception of safety, risk, and benefits of nature play in the Sonoran Desert. The intervention utilized the social media platform, Instagram, to administer the intervention content. Results from this study suggest that even though participants were already engaged in nature play, their perceptions of risk, safety, and benefits of nature play in the Sonoran Desert changed positively or were reinforced. The analysis expands the current literature on risk, safety, and benefits of nature play.

This three-article dissertation considers the pedagogical practices for developing statistically literate students and teaching data-driven decision-making with the goal of preparing students for civic engagement and improving student achievement. The first article discusses a critical review of the literature on data-driven decision-making project conditions in K-12 educational settings. Upon reviewing the literature, I synthesized and summarized the current practices into three distinct models. The models serve to clarify the pedagogical choices of the teacher and the degree at which students' views are involved and incorporated into the projects. I propose an alternative model/framework and discuss possible implications in the classroom. In the second article, I use the framework developed in the first article as the basis for an educational research intervention. I describe a study where I developed a handbook based on the framework and implemented a sample of professional development sessions from the handbook. Advisors and teachers provided feedback on the handbook and professional development. This feedback served as the subject of analysis while I continued to refine the handbook and the professional learning sessions. I describe the refinement process and the implications in terms of design decisions of educational interventions and statistical knowledge for teaching. The final article performs a secondary data analysis of school, teacher, and student level data using the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) database. The paper seeks to answer the research question: “Which aspects of teacher professional knowledge measures predict student achievement in the mathematical domain of data and statistical topics?” The results indicate that when controlling for school level wealth index, teacher characteristics are not as influential as the school level wealth index. I discuss future research as well as school policy and curriculum implications of these results.

This study examines how critical pedagogical practices of testimonies and contradiction and resistance coupled with agentive techniques engaged youth in holistic identity development in a sustainable education context. Using a three-phase design, I analyzed the structure of the Urban Energy Engineering (UEE) citizen science program that engages youth in community-centered energy engineering. The design sought to answer the overarching question: How does critical pedagogy in which students build on their cultural and community knowledge to co-construct knowledge about sustainability while engaging in community-centered projects that promote agency impact their holistic identity development? Using a for intervention model, I used archived data for the summer iteration to develop two analyses to examine how the program engages youth in identity development, agency, and positionality in their community. These analyses influenced my design innovation and implementation with the UEE youth during the spring semester. Findings of my design innovation are organized into three sections (a) coupling of practice towards holistic identity, (b) understanding the relationship between identity and community, and lastly, (c) understanding the relationship between identity and sustainability correlating with my research questions. Lastly, I discuss the design principle necessary to engage youth in holistic identity development (a) Facilitators should provide their own experience and (b) Frame the levels of the individual to the community in agentive practice and critical pedagogical practices.

Expansive framing is a promising approach to understanding transfer but little is known about how it might work in teacher professional development, an area that research suggests would be improved by the use of situative strategies. The Content, Person, Context framework (CPC) that has been developed in online learning contexts draws on the concept of expansive framing and further develops it through a focus on positioning content, person and context for value creation. However, little is known about how it promotes transfer. I studied how these two situative approaches, individually and together, illuminated near-transfer in the context of an online teacher professional development (PD) course. In this mixed methods study I adapted and created rubrics to analyze educators’ stories about how they intended to implement what they had learned in the course. I concluded that CPC and expansive framing support different understandings of authorship, with the former prioritizing immediate action planned for specific contexts and the latter emphasizing learner creation and ownership over time. These different views have consequences for how transfer is understood but can be used to create a model of how transfer can be fostered that is more robust than either framework taken on its own. Because this study is part of an evaluation phase of an ongoing design-based research project, I make recommendations for how expansive framing and CPC can be further used as tools for designing the next iteration of the PD module.

English proficiency is one of the major factors affecting international students’ academic adjustment to American universities. Many international college students select to improve their academic English proficiency through an English intensive program. Collaborative learning is an educational approach to teaching and learning that allows students and teachers to engage in a common task and work together to search for knowledge and skills. This thesis study aims to develop, design, and iteratively refine strategies to help English intensive program teachers build collaborative learning and promote international students’ effective collaboration, so as to improve students' academic English proficiency. In this study, two different collaborative learning strategies were designed, implemented and iterated. Data was collected using qualitative methods and follow the principle of design-based research (DBR; Barab, 2014) The results of this study suggest that successful instructional strategies for collaborative learning should be designed in the following ways. First, gathering participants’ opinions and feedback at all phases of design and iteration; Second, linking the new strategies or activity to students’ grade should be the center of the design. Third, in DBR，researchers need to be patient to build good relationships with practitioners, which can provide a basis for continuing research.

Learning analytics application is evolving into a student-facing solution. Student-facing learning analytics dashboards (SFLADs), as one popular application, occupies a pivotal position in online learning. However, the application of SFLADs faces challenges due to teacher-centered and researcher-centered approaches. The majority of SFLADs report student learning data to teachers, administrators, and researchers without direct student involvement in the design of SFLADs. The primary design criteria of SFLADs is developing interactive and user-friendly interfaces or sophisticated algorithms that analyze the collected data about students’ learning activities in various online environments. However, if students are not using these tools, then analytics about students are not useful. In response to this challenge, this study focuses on investigating student perceptions regarding the design of SFLADs aimed at providing ownership over learning. The study adopts an approach to design-based research (DBR; Barab, 2014) called the Integrative Learning Design Framework (ILDF; Bannan-Ritland, 2003). The theoretical conjectures and the definition of student ownership are both framed by Self-determination theory (SDT), including four concepts of academic motivation. There are two parts of the design in this study, including prototypes design and intervention design. They are guided by a general theory-based inference which is student ownership will improve student perceptions of learning in an autonomy-supportive SFLAD context. A semi-structured interview is used to gather student perceptions regarding the design of SFLADs aimed at providing ownership over learning.

In this study, the current literature regarding student engagement and student voice were reviewed to explore the connection between these two classroom elements. Currently, frequently incorporating student voice in order to increase student engagement most commonly takes place at the high school and university levels. Thus, utilizing Finn’s (1989) participation-identification theory, this study set out to implement a practical design intervention in an elementary classroom to increase student engagement through the incorporation of student voice. Using Design-Based Research, I implemented a collaborative reflection process which allowed students, teacher/researcher, and co-educators to provide feedback on classroom task and participant structures. The feedback was then considered for further iterations of the task and participant structures. This was a pilot study of the collaborative reflection process and was implemented in a fourth-grade math classroom with 26 participants. Along with participating in the collaborative reflection process, the student participants also took a 26 question Learner Empowerment Measure to survey their feelings of identity with the classroom before and after the design intervention. After analyzing audio data gathered during the classroom tasks, as well as student feedback, it was found that student participation did increase due to the design intervention. However, there was no measurable difference in students’ feelings of identity with the classroom due to the collaborative reflection process. Future studies should consider implementing the collaborative reflection process in multiple classrooms across diverse activities during the school year.

Social media platforms have emerged as leading communication channels for social interaction and information sharing in the early part of the 21st century. In an ideal world, social media users should feel that they can interpret the social interactions they witness and the information that is shared on social media platforms as inherently honest and truthful; however, reality is very different. Social media platforms have become vehicles capable of spreading misinformation quickly and broadly. Information literacy offers a pathway for mitigating the negative consequences of misinformation found within various forms of content provided that instruction is contextually defined and applicable to the current information environment. A cognitive framework was used to help facilitate greater efficiency of learning information literacy practices.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between cognitive engagement and learning performance on an instructional module about misinformation on social media. A total of 133 undergraduate students participated in the study. They were surveyed for demographic characteristics, social media activity, and self-efficacy before being randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions (passive, active, constructive, control). Additional measures included a pre-test, post-test and an instrument measuring users’ satisfaction with their instructional experience.

The study produced several statistically significant differences: (a) in the ability of demographic factors encompassing age, gender and years in college to predict the prior knowledge of misinformation on social media; (b) between the means of the three treatment and one control groups and their scores on the post-test assessment controlling for prior knowledge; and (c) between the means of the three treatment and one control groups and time necessary to complete instruction. Using a regression analysis, no significant differences were found with respect to information-focused self-efficacy factors being able to predict prior knowledge of misinformation on social media. The findings from this study can contribute to the basis of support for the use of the Interactive, Constructive, Active, Passive (ICAP) framework in assessing the use of cognitive engagement in designing instruction.

This mixed methods study examined instructor introduction videos for use in online learning. This study intended to identify the influence of video production value on student perceptions of student-instructor intent, specifically in the areas of perceived student-instructor communication and student-instructor connection. This study also examined which production style most accurately aligns student perceptions with instructor intent as well as which video production style is preferred by students.

Using a set of production guidelines, an instructor produced two introduction videos; one of low production value, one of high production value. Student participants were surveyed on their perceptions of the instructor as featured in both videos. The instructor was interviewed using similar questions in order to identify instructor intent and compare instructor intent to student perceptions.

Analysis of data showed that there was no statistical difference between video production value in students’ perceived student-instructor connection or student-instructor communication when compared to the instructor’s intent in the same areas. Data analysis also showed that a high production value was more accurate in portraying instructor intent, however a low production value was preferred by students and portrayed the instructor more positively.